The Father Ted sketch for me, the combination of Ted's paternal frustration and Dougal's extraordinarily blank/panicked face never gets dull.

The Monty Python sketch is annoying, because I love Life of Brian, but I always found the love for that bit baffling, it's just really not funny. I'm with Toby, "Romanes eunt domus" is far superior, it's one of the all-time great comedy sketches. The number of times I tell people to conjugate the verb to go, and they stare at me blankly...

Also, not really a sketch, but for a throwaway line, this bit always really appealed for some reason.

Saving my holier-than-thou nonsense for a more deserving cause since '82

Goat Boy wrote:It can be a pain sometimes. Like when the point of the joke is to actually impress people rather than make them laugh.

Yeah.

There's a great tradition going back to Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, but I much prefer to see people smacking each other over the head. And the interesting thing is, the stupidest stuff is often made by the sharpest minds.

I mean, if it's instinctive comedy that we're talking about, then that sketch in Only Fools in Horses where Del falls through the gap in the bar would be heralded by all as the best thing ever. It's not, it's funny for about 5 seconds and that's it.

The Romans go home sketch is very public school in the way Cleese acts as the classic Latin teacher, but the central premise of the joke is universal.

ooooooohhhhh yeah wrote:Of course there are exceptions, but as laughter is such a basic impulse, surely it makes sense that the best way to elicit it is through something spontaneous.

Much of the best TV/film comedy of the last 50 years has been through the creation of social archetypes that we observe in mostly realistic scenarios. Slapstick comedy has its moments, but it belongs to a different age I feel. I mean, I still love Hulot and Chaplin and sometimes they do seem like utter giants compared to others, but that's because they were in the cinema and as such attracted in the main, a universal audience. Everyone loved Chaplin.

But pure, scripted slapstick today just appears dated to me. We've evolved to a situation where genuine error appears funnier (that US show where people do stupid stuff for laughs but I can't remember what it's called) or countless youtube compilations where people or cats do stupid, unscripted stuff. That's not comedy in the strict sense but it makes me laugh, because yes, as you say, it's spontaneous.